Landsat/OLI/TIRS

Operational Land Imager

Landsat

The Landsat program is a series of Earth-observing satellite missions jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. For 45 consecutive years, Landsat satellites have enabled us to monitor our changing planet, creating an archive unmatched in quality, detail, coverage and length. The eighth Landsat mission launched Feb. 11, 2013, and Landsat 9 is expected to launch in December, 2020.

In addition to OLI, we made the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) cryocooler for Landsat 8. The cryocooler chills the TIRS instrument’s infrared photo detectors to a frigid 40K. Due to our technology advancements in OLI and the TIRS instrument, we’ve substantially improved radiometric performance over previous Landsat sensors. We're building these same components for LandSat 9, tentatively scheduled for launch in 2020.